Chapter 11 Summary and Analysis

Another ex-Dresden POW at the lecture is Tom Jones, who pairs off with Joe Crone, the model for Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five. Jones has written recently, recalling Crone as clumsily packing at Camp Atterbury, and so ill in Dresden that he talks him into going to sick call. Jones recalls the squalor in the barracks, which the Germans do nothing to relieve. Crone is buried somewhere in Dresden in a white paper suit. He starves himself to death before the firestorm. In the novel, he returns home to become a well-to-do optometrist. Jones has become a packrat for war memorabilia, including photographs after liberation, a time Vonnegut describes in Bluebeard. Vonnegut has put in the appendix some of these and a document, "Bomber's Baedeker," showing Dresden no more of a military target than Kalamazoo, Michigan. Vonnegut quotes O'Hare at their...